6. The current algorithms for training Neural Networks have been around since the late 80’s, but the hardware wasn’t fast enough to actually make them usable. In recent years, the arrival of affordable graphics processing units has sped up the training considerably. That has enabled researchers to push the world of supervised learning to a whole new level. Speech Recognition benefits from all of this research and hardware massively.

Speech Recognition in Homes

7. The use of speech rec in children’s toys tends to be a controversial topic. RadioRex was the first toy to respond to a voice command in 1922. Say “Rex” and the toy dog would come launching out of his house at the command.

8. Speaking of highly scrutinized speech recognition toys, remember the popular Hello Barbie doll of 2015? She’s programmed with speech recognition software that converts what children say to her into text. From there, artificial intelligence software extracts keywords from what a child says prompting a response from Barbie’s library of 8,000+ carefully written phrases.

9. Today, it’s less of a novelty to use speech recognition in your home or office. To date, Amazon has sold over 10 million Alexa devices, and Siri remains the most popular virtual assistant with 41 million monthly active users.

Wrap-up

Alexa, did we miss anything? If you have another little-known speech recognition fact, please share with us in the comments below.